Annotation:Went to the River and I Couldn't Get Across
Back to Went to the River and I Couldn't Get Across
WENT TO THE RIVER AND I COULDN'T GET ACROSS. AKA - "Old Aunt Mary Jane," "Ho Babe." Old Time, Breakdown. USA, Oklahoma. A Aeolian. Standard or AEae tunings (fiddle). AABCCD. J.S. Price (Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma; Thede).
Went to the river, I couldn't get across;
I jumped on a bullfrog and thought he was a hoss.
Price's couplet was widespread in Southern tradition as a "floating verse" and variants appear in several songs, such as "Hook and Line." The stanza below was collected in Kentucky around 1905 (MS of C.B. House):
I went to the river and couldn't get across;
Jumped on a 'possum, and thought he was a horse.
The river was deep, and the bottom was sand;
You ought to seed that 'possum racking through the land.
E.C. Perrow, in his collection Songs and Rhymes from the South (1914) gives several variants, all beginning with the protagonist at a river. Perrow grouped them under the title "The Old Gray Horse," with the first one from his own recollection in East Tennessee, sung by whites [Ed. Perrow's term] around 1908:
Went to the river at break uv day,
Couldn't get across, en' uh had to stay;
Paid five dollars fer un ole gray horse,
Wouldn't go erlong, en' 'e wouldn't stan' still,
But jumped up en' daown like un ole flutter-mill.
Perrow found a similar verse sung in Missippi by "country whites" that appeared in the MS. of 'Miss Reedy', 1909:
I went to the river and I couldn't get across;
Paid five dollars for an old gray horse,
Horse wouldn't ride, horse wouldn't swim,
And I'll never see my five dollars agin.
A third version was from "mountain whites" in Virginia, from the MS of D.H. Bishop, 1909:
I went to the river and couldn't get across;
Jumped on a toad-frog and thought he was a horse.
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Thede (The Fiddle Book), 1967; p. 64
Recorded sources:
Back to Went to the River and I Couldn't Get Across